by Sally Zelikovsky, American Thinker:
Jewish conservatives, while considered a bit of an oddity despite growing numbers, are commonly asked Why are so many Jews liberals?
From conservative luminaries like Norman Podhoretz and Dennis Prager to B-team influencers like me, Jewish conservatives have struggled to provide a satisfactory answer. Like any other group, we do not march in lockstep, certainly not when it comes to our religion and definitely not politically. Still, Jewish conservatives readily acknowledge that, like Black Americans, most of us tend to be liberal if not downright progressive and, regrettably, sometimes Marxist.
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Books and articles have been written, and theories abound as to why this is, including, among others, the idea that Jews are liberal out of residual devotion to FDR and his pro-unionism; as pushback against the brutality they suffered under right-wing totalitarians like Hitler; and because, when Jews became secular, they replaced their religion with progressivism.
None of these quite hits the sweet spot, but they all resonate to some extent.
Image: Jews for Palestine by Alisdare Hickson. CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED.
I long ago abandoned any hope of uncovering the definitive reason for this phenomenon but, in thinking about the strong reaction that many liberals and Jewish liberals had to the October 7th Hamas Pogrom, I had a revelation. Bear with me.
In Konstantin Kisin’s must-read article The Day the Delusions Died, he notes that some Americans woke up as liberals on October 7th and went to bed that night as conservatives.
In A Political Reawakening?, Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman explain that this change can be attributed to the “sheer depravity of Hamas’s terrorism” as well as “the sense of how thin the line is between civilization and barbarism. And how the West, which so many take for granted, is more vulnerable than we ever imagined.” According to Weiss, “[t]he contradictions and moral bankruptcy of a worldview that spends years worrying about microaggressions and tone policing, but can’t decide what side it is on after the beheading of babies, aren’t exactly difficult to spot.”
Liberals who went to bed conservatives sincerely believed they were making some grand gesture by supporting Israel’s right to exist while recognizing the plight of the Palestinians until the reality of October 7th exploded their worldview. They are scared sh**less and rethinking the politicians, party, and policies they’ve long supported.
Protesters might feverishly burn Israeli flags in Istanbul, but threatening Jewish students barricaded in a university library in New York City and announcing your exhilaration from your Cornell ivory tower does not win hearts and minds among American liberals suffering from an identity crisis due to what Melanie Phillips, a British journalist and author of Londonistan, has coined a “civilizational crisis.”
This all got me thinking about the “Jewish liberals” question.
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